Sometimes great games have bad stories, and sometimes great stories accompany bad games. However, I have never seen this distinction become more acute than with Soul Reaver 2 for PlayStation 2, Crystal Dynamic's long awaited sequel (actually third in the Legacy Of Kain series) to their 1999 vampire epic.

I think Matt did a great job pointing out the good versus the bad in Soul Reaver 2, so there's no need for me to elaborate on any of that. But I would like to expound one of his points—the balance between story and game, which is Soul Reaver 2's most glaring flaw.

Nintendo incites a "teddy bear" complex for me. I started playing video games with the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. Fifteen years later my matured taste in games led me to buy a Playstation 2. However, I keep coming back to Nintendo. I have an attachment to it, much like people are attached to their old teddy bears.

Its tough to disagree with a lot of Chi's gripes about NBA Courtside 2002, but I dont believe that the game is as bad as Chi says. I liked the mechanical-themed menus. I thought that the players looked fairly realistic, and I have not seen a basketball game with accurate faces like Courtside has. I appreciated Courtsides slower pacing, as compared to a fast-paced arcade basketball game like NBA Jam. The game is far from perfect, Ill grant you thatbut it is a very playable basketball game that can potentially serve as the foundation for an even better sequel.

Right from opening menus of the game, I already got my first sign that I was in for a stinker. The aesthetics of the menus could only be described as butt-ugly. It almost looks like the graphics and design was lifted straight out of the N64 version, washed out colors and tacky 3D graphics in all.

As a gamer, do you ever notice that some development studios tend to turn out the same substandard kind of product without ever stepping back to evaluate their handiwork before churning out a sequel? Im not talking about the debugging process or other technical things like that, but rather, game design and philosophy in general.

Shadow Hearts is the game Koudelka should have been—an earnest and intriguing RPG that mixes a historical setting with an occult influence in much the same way the Persona/Megami Tensei games have been doing for years. The end result is one of the darkest and most interesting console RPGs to come along in recent memory (the only other games that really compare are Atlus Persona titles). Sacnoth clearly learned from their errors with Koudelka, and its because of this that Shadow Hearts is so good,

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